Glenwood Springs Packed With Comedy, Bluegrass, and Author Laura Resau

Glenwood Springs —Laura Resau writes in a vintage trailer. She lives with a rock-hound husband, a musician son, a wild husky, and one hundred house plants. She teaches graduate creative writing at Western Colorado University. On Thursday, Sept. 10, she’s coming to Glenwood Springs for an author talk and book signing at Alpenglow Books. It’s free.

The Post Independent published the full arts and entertainment lineup for Sept. 4 through 13. The calendar is dense. It’s the kind of week where you have to pick your battles if you want to see more than one thing.

The week kicks off with the September First Friday in Carbondale. The Thunder River Theatre Company and Elvecino Shows are hosting First Friday Comedy at the Launchpad, 76 South Fourth St. Local comedians take the stage from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. If you want a specific show, TRTC has a comedy set at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. You buy them online.

Then there’s the 9/11 Day of Service. High Country Volunteers is holding an assembly line at Colorado Mountain College’s Glenwood Center, 1402 Blake Ave. From 4:15 to 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 11, volunteers will pack children’s activity play kits for Project Sunshine. These go to hospitals across the country. The organization says the materials spark joy and aid physical and emotional healing. It’s free, but you have to register on their website.

On that same Friday night, the Jacob Jolliff Band plays the Ute Theater and Events Center in Rifle. The paper calls them one of the most cutting-edge progressive bluegrass groups on the scene today. They released “Instrumentals, Vol. 2: Mandolin Mysteries” in May 2024. Their set spans trad bluegrass to unlikely pop covers. Tickets range from $20 to $60.

The week also features “Every Brilliant Thing” from Thunder River Theatre Company. The Post Independent description cuts off mid-sentence, but the premise is stark: a mother’s suicide attempt and her seven-year-old’s search to understand it. The child documents the joys around them to help lift her mother’s depression. It starts with ice cream.

Make no mistake, this is a heavy mix of light and dark. You can laugh at a local comedian in Carbondale on Friday afternoon, then pack hospital kits for children in Glenwood Springs at 4:15 p.m., then drive to Rifle for bluegrass. Or you can sit in a quiet room on Thursday and listen to Resau talk about her books, which have won five Colorado Book Awards.

The Post Independent notes that for a complete list of events around Garfield County and the Roaring Fork Valley, you can go to their community calendar. They didn’t list every single event in this roundup. They picked the highlights.

Resau’s books include “The River Muse” and “The Alchemy of Flowers.” She’s trilingual. She lived in Provence and Oaxaca. She studied cultural anthropology. The fact that she’s writing from a trailer in Fort Collins while teaching at Western Colorado University is worth noting. It suggests a life that’s deliberately unmoored from the typical academic orbit.

The calendar doesn’t care about your schedule. It just lists times and places. You decide what matters.